2012 Season Premieres – Tuesday and Wednesday

Next in our series of season premiere reviews are the shows that aired on Tuesday Sept. 25 and Wednesday Sept. 26 2012. Overall it’s a strong night as far as series go, but not all the shows really shined the way they normally would. And not all the new shows were really worth watching. Don’t forget to check out our coverage of Monday night, and Thursday and Friday nights.

Tuesday

Out of these two nights, Tuesday was definitely the better. I enjoyed all of the shows for the most part. Probably won’t watch at least one of them ever again, not because it was bad though, just because it’s not my kind of show. You’ll see more as you read.

New Girl

New Girl was one of the few consistently funny shows of last year, every line might not be hilarious, but the overall episode have enough humor in them to make it worth watching. The thing is, Jess (Zoey Dechannel) though the title character is not the character with the most laughs. Certainly she has her moments, but more times than not she’s just portrayed as overly niave and that’s where they try to get the laughs. The other characters are the real comedy meat of this show. They’re such a strange collection of characters that you wouldn’t really expect to be as close as they actually are.

With all of that in mind, for the new season we were actually greeted with 2 new episode. They both had a centered story on Jess having career issues and trying to work them out. And though this gave some laughs in both episodes it was really the other stuff that made it work. I particularly enjoyed Schmidt trying to spin fire to celebrate the removal of his cast at a party in the first episode. And the second episode had Nick believing he was talking to his future self in the form of a older drunken bar fly. Meanwhile we’re shown the silly situations that Jess manages to get herself into like it’s scooby doo. Don’t get me wrong, her parts are funny, one great moment was when the guys are trying to talk her out of being a ‘shot girl’ at a party and points out that she tripped while standing still. This was followed by a Family Guy-esque flashback to Jess playing on her phone and just falling over.

I think overall the premieres were good, and right inline with what we saw last season, though I would have liked to see a little more fallout from Nick moving back in at the end of last season. If the rest of the season is like these episodes than New Girl will continue to be the hit it was last year. Hopefully they figure out Jess’ career story soon and move onto something else though, I don’t need 20+ episodes of that.

Ben & Kate

Ben & Kate is that show that is funny and fun to watch, but will probably not make it past this first season. That’s just TV for you, not much we can do about it other than hope it catches on and gets strong enough ratings. Well that and hope that the show actually stays good. The first episode set it up to be one of those goofy sitcoms like Raising Hope, where the characters are going to get into some ridiculous situations and be completely dysfunctional 90% of the time. Any series where a 5 year old is the one giving advice to a grown man screams dysfunctional.

Regardless of that I’m looking forward to seeing more of this show and just how it plays out. The first episode gave us a lot of setup about who these characters are and why they’re the way they are. That’s really what a pilot should do, introduce us to the main players in the series and give us a general idea of who they are. We don’t everything, just enough to be able to connect with the character and not feel as if they’re not these over the top caricature of what a person could be.
Being surrounded by strong shows like Raising Hope and New Girl will probably help out Ben & Kate early on, I’m sure people will end up leaving Fox on for the half hour and see what the show is about. The big test will be longevity and whether they can keep it interesting and not just make every episode about how Kate doesn’t want Ben to do something crazy, but he does it anyway and they make up / team up in the end.

Mindy Project

I was hesitant about this show from the start, it just didn’t seem interesting to me. And while I can see the humor in it it’s certainly not my kind of show. I think this is the kind of show that more females will enjoy than males. Guys will get there laughs with some of the antics, but it’s pretty much just a romantic comedy. Which isn’t bad for TV when it’s done right, there are plenty of shows where you watch it and expect to characters to get together. The Mindy Project just kind of forces it on you. You need to expect something good to happen, and that’s just not enjoyable.

Sons of Anarchy (episode 3)

Son’s of Anarchy has been one of my favorite shows to watch for a while now. It’s on late enough and on a cable channel that they certainly get away with more than a lot of other network shows could. Granted not nearly as much as HBO or Showtime do. Season 5 has been on for a few weeks now, and it’s been pretty intense from the start. Last season took a while to really get going, but once it did was a lot of fun. This season came out of the games running, we’ve had a huge death already that not only shocked fans, but will certainly have some serious repercussions later on. And the antagonist this season actually feels like he’s more than SAMCRO can handle.

Sons of Anarchy is a series that you can’t really make too many guess about. They throw a ton of curveballs at you every episode. The death season at the end of episode 3 actually had me sitting up with my mouth open in shock. It wasn’t terribly graphic, but just enough to really get the point across. And the other actors screaming and freaking out the whole time it went down just really drove it that much deeper.

So far this has been a great season for the actors, I feel like they’re all really getting some fantastic story points. Especially the guys who were usually on the sidelines like Tig. If you haven’t seen Sons of Anarchy before I suggest grabbing the first 4 seasons, most should be on Netflix and getting caught up. You’ll become addicted in no time!

Wednesday

Wednesday was a bit of a throwaway night for me. I had nothing lined up to watch that was on that night. So I decided to go with ABC, which has some of the more popular sitcoms. I’d seen the shows before, as I’ll discuss below. Unfortunately Wednesday just wasn’t a great night and you’ll see why below.

The Middle

I don’t watch The Middle too often, usually if nothing else is on, or someone else is watching it. It’s not that it’s a bad show, I just never got into it. It’s actually usually pretty funny. The season premiere unfortunately wasn’t all that funny. Maybe it’s because it was an hour long, or that the scope of it was suppose to cover the whole summer. I don’t know, but I just didn’t like it, I wouldn’t hold it against the series, if you’ve never seen an episode don’t start with this though. Watching something older or give episode 2 a try.

One thing I can say for The Middle is they get that middle class family thing down. Shows like Malcolm in the Middle and Raising Hope try it but tend to put their characters more in the low class category with some ridiculous problems. And while the episodes I have seen of The Middle do have some ridiculous problems it’s usually fairly grounded and feel like problems that could really happen, just funnier.

Modern Family

Like The Middle I haven’t seen a ton of Modern Family, but what I have seen I really enjoy. The season premiere was way more pleasing than The Middle and picks up right where last season left off. And we see the outcome of most of what happened in last year’s season finale. We also get some fun stuff with Ed O’Neill’s character who is probably my favorite, just because I grew up watching Married With Children, and though his characters are different they’re still hilarious.

I don’t know if I’ll ever watch this show on a regular basis, and that’s fine because it’s a good enough series that you can catch pretty much any episode and get a few good laughs and follow what’s happening. Things carry over from episode to episode, but it’s not hard to catch up. If you’ve got nothing to watch on Wednesday nights, or you want to try something new definitely give Modern Family a shot, you could even record it for those times when you don’t know what you want to put on it’s a fun way to pass the time.

The Neighbors

I actually missed most of this premiere, and usually I wouldn’t even mention it, but what I did see what terrible! The acting was bad, the premise was bad, it’s probably the worst show this season. I’m not the only one to feel this way, I’ve read multiple reviews and they’re all pretty similar.

Just avoid this show, it’s not worth the time, read a book or something instead.

Chris talks a bunch on PodQuest each week. He's also been known to write about stuff from time to time. You can Email Chris or follow Chris on Twitter @Just_Cobb or Facebook

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